Dan Sylveste is the son (?) of a controversial, whose experiments on fellow humans apparently didn't work out terribly well. A political leader himself, Sylveste is obsessed with the remains of the alien Amarantin civilization. In particular, he's bothered by the way their technological advances seem to have stalled out and the way this failure won't jibe with the remnants left behind. His research gets seriously side-tracked when there's a coup against him.

Ana Khouri is a soldier who was separated from her husband and then shipped home injured, so that he must be long dead now, given the time changes during space travel. With nothing left to lose or live for, she's become an assassin in a modern diversion for the super-rich who try to avoid being killed by people they hire themselves. But now someone has hired her to travel to the dead Amarantin world, Resurgam and kill Sylveste, who's own trail is leading there.

Ilya Volyova is the mate on an advanced interstellar ship, Nostalgia for Infinity. The captain of the ship is being consumed by software virus plagues. Only Sylveste can help him, so they too are headed to Resurgam. They've been tricked into enlisting Khouri as their gunnery officer.

Meanwhile, a construct of some sort--called only Sun Stealer--is roaming the ship and fighting both of Khouri's employers for control of her.

Sound kind of convoluted? Well, that ain't the half of it. First time novelist Alastair Reynolds also packed in heaping doses of science and speculation, such that it's easy to get confused about exactly whether the action of the book is even physically possible (or ever will be). And the backstory that is required along the way could pretty much be a stand-alone novel.

But when you sweep everything else away and cut to the core of the story (mild spoiler alert), he's basically riffing on Fermi's Paradox. His answer to the question of why alien cultures have never contacted us is that in the wake of "The Dawn War," when advanced civilizations ripped up the galaxy, a species called The Inhibitors put in place a warning and disposal system that gets rid of any sufficiently advanced new culture that arises. That's what seems to have happened to the Amarantins and, by following in their footsteps, Sylveste may be about to unleash the same fate on humankind. This interweaving of the ancient idea of forbidden knowledge with all kinds of futuristic notions makes the book satisfying on numerous levels, even if you aren't sure what just happened when you finish it.

"I started off with just the idea of killer robots and then it became more sophisticated because of the ramifications of the Fermi Paradox." (The paradox that highlights the apparent contradiction between the high probability of the existence of alien civilisations and the lack of evidence for, or our dearth of contact with, them.) [...]
"In 'soft' sci-fi like Star Trek, the paradox wasn't even recognised," Reynolds says. "Humans had contact with aliens all the time, and the aliens were just a little bit more or less advanced than us - they may have had a little more warp drive, but ultimately we could compete with them. I thought it was much more likely that aliens and we would have an enormous technical disparity, to the extent that we could barely communicate. So the question is, what do you do with that in science fiction? [...]
"In Revelation Space books, the backdrop is that the aliens are all wiped out by killer machines and so the universe is littered with ruins of their civilisations. It's an arse backwards answer to the paradox, but it gave me a lot of scope to develop a vast imaginary universe."